In my last blog, we looked at ‘content writing’ – writing copy for other people’s websites (here’s a link). We learned that there are two markets; one, a sort of slave-trade, the other a very profitable one where we never describe the service as ‘content writing’ - one where we add value. And the easiest way we can add value is by providing the research. In this blog we will learn how to use the web for research, including free information portals used by journalists. First, though, I would like to extend the accepted definition of ‘content writing’ because it’s too restrictive and because it excludes the really profitable opportunities for freelance copywriters.

The heavy duty (and most profitable) stuff If you think about it, copywriting is all about providing content – not just for web pages, but for White Papers, articles and so on. It’s those latter areas that are real gold mines. Each year I write a White Paper on a very specific part of the finance industry (no, I do not have a background in finance. That’s not necessary; I can research what I need). That project is worth £6,000 ($9,000) each time. I write a ‘state of the industry’ report for a pharma company that’s worth $4,000 ($6,000). The writing is dead easy. The value I add is in the research.Finding .ac, .gov, .org sites We all know how to make searches on the web but, when it comes to heavy duty content, we are often overwhelmed with flotsam and jetsam. What we really need is authoritative input, for example government statistics, academic reports and so on. This sort of material is found on sites ending with .edu, gov, .ac, .org. The good news: it’s possible to make searches, filtered so that the results come only from such sites. To do that, you need to use Google Advanced Search : http://www.google.com/advanced_search You will be offered lots of search parameters to focus your search. In the example below, I am asking the question “China overtaking USA?” and (see bottom of the picture) I have asked for academic websites only....

There are lots of websites dedicated to providing authoritative input for journalists (and nowadays bloggers) and one in particular, Journalist’s Resource developed by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, is invaluable.

It is an open-access site that curates scholarly studies and reports. NB it is very US-oriented.

As an example, suppose you are researching subject like Immigration or Climate Change. Go to the Browse Studies Database (Studies>government>immigration), and when I visited there were 52 studies on the subject. Here’s a screen-grab:

Another example climate change (65 studies):

The journalist's toolbox

Now this site really is a goldmine. It’s a sort of ‘list of lists’, giving links to authoritative research/report websiteshttp://www.journaliststoolbox.org/archive/other-journalism-research-pages/ It is quite daunting at first simply because there are so many links. For example, I chose Women’s Issues and got literally pages of links to websites focusing on that wide topic. There is, however, a useful search box (right hand column) that provides more specific links. Beyond Google – the ‘deep web’ or ‘invisible web’ (don’t get too excited)

Google, like most search engines, uses software ‘spiders’ to crawl the web, indexing what can be found where. Unfortunately, spiders have difficulty searching databases – and much valuable data is held in databases. To make things worse, many university libraries, governmental and other statistical website choose to block out Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on. In fact, the ‘deep web’, or ‘invisible web’ is larger than the surface web. It has been estimated that the invisible web has around 500 times as much data as the visible web. So, how to you break in? In recent years there have been attempts to develop search engine type capabilities for the deep web, with names like Clusty, Surfwax, and The Internet Archive. I have not given you any links because I have never had a satisfactory experience. Many early search engines have simply disappeared or you get a response ‘Site no longer maintained’.

If anyone has found a truly usable and useful way of searching the deep web, do please let me know. I will post and pass the information on.